Description

Introduction

I have a problem with my Radeon 9600se, it has no fan and when run hard for an hour or so can overheat and either corrupt the graphics or shut off the computer entirely. The goal of this project is to replace the stock heatsink with a heatsink/fan combo with fan controller.

Project

This is my card in all its infinite glory, a value purchase when I got it 2 years ago, today it is a bit outdated, but I decided to go for it anyway. On the right is an eVGA Nvidia Geforce FX5900 which will be donating its heatsink and fan for this mod.

First things first I had to take that silly sticker off the cooler, which revealed a really nice looking mirrored metal plate, which not only looks better, but does not say nvidia all over my ati card. It was a complete pain in the rump to take off, took about 20 minutes and a lot of Alcohol (the rubbing kind). Also there is the back view of the card, as you can see the wire comes out of the hole at the back and down to the A1 pin on the AGP connector, which btw is the only line that runs from the motherboard to the AGP card that carries 12v, im glad it was easily accessible.

This is the completed front view of my card, the cooler was by far extremely hard to mount to my card, as ATI and Nvidia do not use the same mounting hole locations, so I had to drill new holes in the cooler, and hide the screws, and make sure the heads were flat under the fan to let the fan spin and also to keep them from spinning inside the cooler when I bolt them onto the back, the little PCB above the fan is the fan controller circuit I stole out of an old power supply, it keeps the fan at about 7v and when the sensor detects more heat, it increases the fan speed to 12v, I put that on there to keep noise down, and just because I could put that on there.

This image is of the fan controller circuit I used to power the coolers fan, the controller had a weird connector on it, so I simply soldered on the one I stole from the fx5900, and as you can see in the picture, the red and black wires on the other side of the PCB, the black one is soldered to an etched piece of the cards PCB (the ground) and the red wire goes through a hole in the card to the back of the card where I tapped into the cards 12v input. This is the relocated capacitor, I had to move it because it was sitting in such a way that it would not allow me to use the other mounting hole on the side of the gpu, so it had to be moved, i will probably secure it better later on, for now it works.

This shows in greater detail the hole that was drilled to allow the +12v wire that ran to the fan controller to run to the back of the card to get the required 12v. This shows the solder point at which i soldered my fan controller wire to the A1 pin on the AGP connector.